Inside the Drug-Dealing Empire That Ruled West PhillyOZY
He attended Temple University, but he became a prominent figure in one of the city’s most notorious organized crime groups a violent enterprise that made tens of millions of dollars from the sale of drugs from 1985 to 1991. The JBM sold 200 to 300 …

Letter: Support the FBIRoanoke Times
… Goldwater’s guys; short haired suit wearing bashers of long haired hippie anti-war protesters have, according to Fox News, become puppets of the leftist liberal Democrats intent on overthrowing the great, great, trust me, greatest president of the …

How Hillary’s FBI Allies Undermined Trump Before the ElectionFrontPage Magazine
Strzok and Page weren’t supposed to be planting hit pieces in the media, but the politicization of the FBI and the DOJ had corrupted them. Instead of searching for the truth, they were working for Hillary Clinton. And their texts, nasty and media …

I’ve finished reading all three hundred pages of the newly released testimony from the company behind the Trump-Russia dossier, and remarkably, I didn’t learn anything new. Trump is being blackmailed by Russia. Trump has ties to organized crime. People have been murdered in the name of covering up the Trump-Russia scandal. These are all things that Palmer Report and others have been reporting for the past year. Yet these new transcripts have somehow managed to blow the Trump-Russia scandal wide open anyway.

All you have to do is turn on the television and watch how the scandal is now being covered, to see that these transcripts have indeed changed everything. I’ve spent all day trying to put my finger on why. Sure, respected Senator Dianne Feinstein threw her considerable weight behind the assertions made in the transcript, but it’s not as if this was her own testimony or research. She only published this because she felt the public deserved to know what the Trump-Russia dossier company had told Congress behind closed doors. But this is still the same Trump-Russia dossier we’ve all had for a year. This testimony doesn’t even add anything new to it. Yet still, something has changed.

Of all the strange aspects of the Trump-Russia scandal to date, by far the strangest has been the mainstream media’s personal hatred for the Trump-Russia dossier. Major news outlets initially refused to touch the dossier at all, then only reluctantly covered it once it leaked, but even then it was only with the constant qualifier that it was “unverified” or worse. Meanwhile, those same news outlets have routinely and often gleefully reported aspects of the Trump-Russia scandal that were far less credible, with no disclaimers of any kind.

Maybe the media has just been throwing a tantrum for the past year because it felt embarrassed after initially considering the dossier to have been unimportant, only to be proven wrong. But whatever the reason, today’s transcripts while giving us no new information, and frankly not doing anything to further “verify” what’s already been independently verified have managed to change the entire framing of the scandal.

Perhaps the transcripts have simply given the mainstream media an excuse to hit the reset button on its approach to the Trump-Russia dossier. In any case, the dossier is now considered the gold standard by the media, which means mainstream America will quickly come to see it the same way. Everything changed today about how the Trump-Russia scandal is perceived, even though we didn’t learn anything new. That’s the strangest development in the scandal yet.

Trump and Netanyahu are playing the same gameWashington Post
This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a prominent Trump ally, found himself doing the same. A recording aired Tuesday by Channel 2, an Israeli broadcaster, featured the voice of Yair Netayahu during a drunken romp around Tel Aviv’s …

Finnish TV and toilet paper did as much to undermine the USSR as the nuclear deterrent, an Estonian friend once explained to me. He grew up in Tallinn, under Kremlin rule but within antenna range of American soaps broadcast from Helsinki. What Dallas did for eyes that craved glamour, a smuggled supply of soft tissue did for bums rubbed raw by Soviet-issue bog roll. The Balts had too much exposure to what they were missing to be reconciled to the privations of communism.

Author of Trump Dossier Referred to FBI for Criminal InvestigationThe Jewish Voice (press release) (blog)
Two top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are asking the Justice Department and FBI to open up a criminal investigation into dossier author Christopher Steele. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham alleged in a …

China Vies for Influence in Russia’s BackyardGlobal Trade Magazine (blog)
Our recent visit to Kazakhstan and the Khorgos Eastern Gate area starkly revealed the dilemma that Kazakhstan faces. Here, we argue that for Kazakhstan to become a high-income country, it will be important that the United States, the EuropeanUnion …

Dem senators’ report warns of Russian meddling across EuropeLas Vegas Sun
But even without GOP backing, the report’s recounting of Russian operations in 19 European nations foreshadows the still-unpublished Senate intelligence committee’s bipartisan inquiry into Russia’s role during the 2016 U.S. presidential election…

One suspects, though, that many readers will forgive any such errors. The book confirms their worst fears about the Trump presidency: it feels truthful, if not always factual.

On some days hell watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight, an insider told me. He kneels in front of the TV, with his face about four inches from the screen, and says encouraging things to the gorillas, like the way you hit that other gorilla was good. I think he thinks the gorillas can hear him.

The worst kept secret in the entire Trump-Russia scandal is that Donald Trump has decades of business relationships with organized crime figures, and those deals are likely a big part of how the Russian government took control of Trump financially ahead of his entry into politics. Today’s release of Trump-Russia transcripts reveals that organized crime is indeed at the heart of the Trump-Russia scandal.

Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the company behind the Trump-Russia dossier, testified privately before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the summer of 2017. Democratic ranking member Dianne Feinstein released the transcripts of that testimony today over the objections of Trump’s Republican apologists on the committee. The transcripts reveal what was behind the effort to assemble the dossier: “It was, broadly speaking, a kind of holistic examination of Donald Trump’s business record and his associations, his bankruptcies, his suppliers, you know, offshore or third-world suppliers of products that he was selling. You know, it evolved somewhat quickly into issues of his relationships to organized crime figures but, you know, really the gamut of Donald Trump.”

In fact the three hundred-plus page transcript references “organized crime” fourteen different times. While the testimony does not give away the specifics of how Trump is tied to organized crime, it’s a given that Fusion GPS has already provided these details to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Some of Trump’s ties to organized crime, and more specifically Russian organized crime, have already been publicly documented.

For instance, the Trump Organization has done several major real estate deals in New York City with a guy named Felix Sater, who has done prison time in relation to laundering money for the Russian mafia. In addition, the U.S. Treasury Department hit the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City with a hefty fine for years of facilitating money launderers, which included the period of time in which Donald Trump still owned a commanding stake in the property.